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Asus Striker II Formula Review

Testing:

The Asus Striker II Formula will be put through our benchmarking suite to see what kind of performance the motherboard delivers. The OverclockersClub series of benchmarks include both system tests and gaming benchmarks to verify the performance of this product. I will be comparing the performance of the Striker against the Abit IX38 Quad GT, the Asus Maximus Formula and the Foxconn MARS. The tests will compare performance against one P35 and two X38 chipsets, to see if the 780i SLI chipset can outperform the Intel built solutions. Testing will be a direct comparison of our stock speed benchmarking; all clock speeds and memory timings will be as close as possible to offer a fair comparison on each of the boards. All motherboard and video card settings were left at setup defaults, again to eliminate any variables.

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Processor: Intel Q6600

Sytem Memory: Mushkin HP2 6400 5-5-4-12

Overclocking the Asus Striker II Formula was a bit more challenging than many of the boards I have worked with lately. At first anything over 370FSB was a no go at any multiplier. After working through all of the options I was terribly stuck. Not good for a chipset that holds so much promise. After a couple nights of testing, reboots, and BSODs, I had to conclude that four gigabytes of system memory and a quad-core CPU was just to much for the northbridge. The heat generated by the northbridge was pretty substantial, so cooling it was no longer an option, but mandatory. So in comes the 110CFM fan to take care of the heat. Still this did not allow me to break the 370FSB wall that I had encountered. Time to go back to square one. I threw out everything I thought I knew, started fresh, and finally hit upon a combination that allowed me to push righ on past 370FSB and settle on 450 x 8 as my final overclock. I was able to push the memory up to 1000Mhz and was stable at that speed with the default timings. I ended up running the memory unlinked at a speed of 450Mhz to match the CPU core clock speeds to make things a little easier on the hardware. Quad-core, four gigabytes of memory and a final clock speed of 3.6 Ghz. This is the clock speed where I will run the overclocked benchmarks for this review. Your mileage may vary, and results are what I was able to achieve with this combination of parts.